We explain why it’s so important to get the main menu right

Ever landed on a website that sells the product that you want to purchase, yet you are confronted with over 1000 different products, and sorting through them, well that’s a difficult task?

Plus, when you go to the main menu, that’s to see if you can shortlist the overwhelming list of products, well, you find you can’t, so what do you do?

Well, you leave the website, and you find a different business, one that allows you to find the product that you wish to purchase easily.

This means that the business may incur a very high bounce rate, which simply means that if your web design Cardiff business builds a website that’s difficult to use, or doesn’t offer features that customers want, then they may leave the website, which is what can cause a high bounce rate.

So how can a business help a shopper to find an product or a service easily?

Well, the obvious answer to that would me to use HTML and CSS to design a main menu, and within this blog post we are going to give our top tips when building a main menu.

Make it as simple as possible to avoid a high bounce rate

It’s all well and good selling thousands of products, yet if you cannot get to the product easily, that the shopper wants to purchase then your business may incur a high bounce rate.

This is why your web developer should work with your business to make sure that you obtain a main menu that has the following qualities:

· Easy to use

· Easy to sort items

· No glitches

· Mobile menu is easy to use

Your business should try to prevent incurring a high bounce rate, the reason for this is a high bounce rate means that a lot of shoppers are leaving your website after just visiting the first page.

Now, some SEO agencies believe that a high bounce rate means that your business may not be answering the query, so couldn’t adversely affect your businesses seo.

So for example, let’s say you are looking for a pair of running trainers, and you look at two businesses that sells running trainers, business one, you land on the homepage, you see that the menu is not very good, as it doesn’t allow you to sort by brand, so you leave the website, and that’s just after visiting the homepage.

Business two, that has a main menu that’s really easy to use, so you look for a pair of trainers, you visit over 10 pages, then make a purchase, now which business do you think the algorithms would deem have stronger seo?

Business number two, that’s because the bounce rate might be low, because more people are visiting more pages, rather than leaving the website more or less straightaway and causing a super high bounce rate.

Spend a good while designing the main menu

If you were to ask us, as website designers what we think contributes to making a menu good quality, we would say the following:

· Must be easy to use

· Make it obvious, don’t make the menu disappear until its hovered over, as you might end up with a high bounce rate as shoppers may not see the menu

· Make it easy to get to a group of products, such as men’s shoes, then offer the shopper the choice to narrow down the amount of products, such as by colour of the shoes, or shoe size

· Make sure that your website is responsive, or that you have an AMP version of the website and that the menu is easy to use on tablets and also smartphones

A/B or split testing

A main menu is going to be very different for a business that sells wedding cakes, than it would be for a business that sells thousands of used cars.

So, your Cardiff web design company may offer split testing, which some agencies will refer to as “A/B testing”.

What this basically means is that no one will know how well your website works, that’s until you obtain real shoppers.

Then you may wish to hire a website design business to offer A/B testing, this is so they can make gradual improvements to the design.

So, for example, during one weekend they may offer a different main menu design, so perhaps its as simple as reordering the products, and then the marketing agency may report back that the bounce rate has declined, so you as the business may then make that change permanent.

Test

It’s all well and good hiring a web design company, and then saying that’s a great design, and then not test the website.

That’s because the website may incur glitches, that’s to say the main menu may work fine on desktop’s and some smartphones, but on one smartphone operating system the main menu may not work, and this could mean that potentially you are losing customers, so your web design company and your company should carry out regular testing, as if there’s a problem this can then be rectified quickly.

How we are able to help

If your business is based here in Cardiff, South Wales, or anywhere else across the U.K and you are looking for a web design business that can build a quality website, then why not give us a ring?

We can build Joomla, as well as also WordPress websites, so why not give us a ring today?